Case Detail
| Case Title | AMERICAN OVERSIGHT v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| District | District of Columbia | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| City | Washington, DC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Number | 1:2018cv00319 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Filed | 2018-02-12 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Closed | 2019-07-31 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Judge | Judge Christopher R. Cooper | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Plaintiff | AMERICAN OVERSIGHT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Description | American Oversight submitted four FOIA requests to the Department of Justice for records concerning a variety of issues arising from a letter to the agency from House Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). The agency acknowledged receipt of the requests, but after hearing nothing further from the agency, American Oversight filed suit. Complaint issues: Failure to respond within statutory time limit, Adequacy - Search, Litigation - Vaughn index, Litigation - Attorney's fees | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Defendant | U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Appeal | D.C. Circuit 19-5257 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Documents | Docket Complaint Complaint attachment 1 Complaint attachment 2 Complaint attachment 3 Complaint attachment 4 Opinion/Order [31] FOIA Project Annotation: Although the government bears the burden of showing that it properly processed a FOIA request sent to an agency, that its search was legally sufficient, and that any exemption claims are appropriate, courts frequently require sophisticated FOIA litigants to take into account bureaucratic delays or innocent errors on the part of agencies in considering whether agency conduct constitutes a deliberate attempt to evade or minimize the agency's statutory obligations or rather a good faith attempt to comply with those obligations. A recent example of the tensions that can occur in such clashes involves a FOIA request by American Oversight for written guidance given to U.S. District Attorney for the District of Utah John Huber by Department of Justice officials as part of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions' instructions that Huber conduct an investigation of certain issues related to the 2016 presidential election. Before searching for such records, the Office of Information Policy contacted the Office of the Attorney General, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, and eventually Huber himself, to inquire about the existence of written guidance. Initially, the consensus of the officials was that no written guidance existed because it had been conveyed orally. But when Huber was shown the reply brief DOJ intended to file in the case, he readily located a responsive email attachment. DOJ conducted a supplemental email search but found no other records. The agency then moved for summary judgment. For its part, however, American Oversight argued that the initial person-to-person search was conducted in bad faith and asked for limited discovery. Huber's investigation was prompted by a 2017 request from 20 Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee, including then chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), that DOJ appoint a second special counsel to investigate the behavior of Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The agency responded to Goodlatte's letter by indicating that it would make recommendations as to whether such an inquiry should be opened. A year later, American Oversight submitted four FOIA requests related to Goodlatte's request. Three of the requests were subsequently resolved â€" one request asked for records pertaining to the drafting of DOJ's response to Goodlatte, a second request asked for the identities of federal prosecutors tasked with evaluating the issues raised by Goodlatte, and a third related to any recusal issues brought up by Sessions' participation in the matter. By the time Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in the case, the only remaining request was for any guidance provided to federal prosecutors tasked with evaluating the issues in Goodlatte's letter as indicated in the agency's response letter. When Huber finally saw the agency's reply brief, he explained that Matthew Whitaker, then serving as Sessions' chief of staff, had emailed him guidance. Once OIP learned of the email, it conducted a supplementary search, but found no other responsive records. American Oversight argued that overlooking an obviously responsive email was a matter of bad faith on the part of the agency and that American Oversight should be granted limited discovery. Cooper first addressed the issue of whether DOJ had acted in bad faith in initially indicating that any guidance had been communicated orally and not in writing and then admitted that written guidance existed that had been sent to Huber by Whitaker. American Oversight also emphasized that the agency had conveniently failed to provide the email until four days after Whitaker stepped down as acting Attorney General. Cooper found it difficult to conclude that the government had acted in bad faith. He pointed out that "rare is the case that compels a court to cast a skeptical eye on an agency's FOIA declarations â€" and this is not one of them. DOJ did an about face, to be sure. But the fact that an agency discovers an error in its earlier representations, and thereafter changes course, does not alone displace the good-faith presumption courts accord its declarations." Cooper cited Military Audit Project v. Casey, 656 F.2d 724 (D.C. Cir. 1981), in which the D.C. Circuit found that an agency's admission that it subsequently found more responsive records spoke to an agency's fallibility rather than its mendacity, and a host of cases reaching the same conclusion, as supporting his ruling here. He explained that "the Court concludes that DOJ remains entitled to the presumption of good faith. At bottom, American Oversight has predicated its bad-faith argument on a single error in the first [OIP] declaration. The error was no doubt significant. And it may even raise some doubts about the sincerity of Mr. Whitaker's apparent belief that no guidance or directives had been reduced to record form, especially because Whitaker himself sent the email attaching the responsive document." He noted that "although the agency made a mistake, it has been forthright in acknowledging and correcting it, and other considerations undermine the suggestion that it has proceeded in bad faith." American Oversight tried to distinguish the Military Audit Project decision as pertaining only to circumstances involving complex searches. Cooper rejected that argument, pointing out that "the very reason Military Audit Project held that an initial mistake could not doom an agency's declarations was because the Circuit wanted to encourage agencies to reflect and do better, not retreat into recalcitrance. A myopic focus on the reasonableness of the initial failures, divorced from the agency's remedial efforts to cure them, would erode that principle. . .To the contrary, an agency's declarations will almost always remain entitled to a presumption of good faith so long as the agency acknowledged error and corrects for it â€" which is what DOJ did in this case." Having found that DOJ acted in good faith, Cooper rejected American Oversight's request for discovery. He then proceeded to address American Oversight's challenges to the adequacy of the agency's search. American Oversight argued that DOJ's search was too limited because it was restricted to those agency officials who would have been most likely to have been in direct communication with Huber, neglecting to search those officials' staff. American Oversight seized on the fact that the agency had searched the emails of two of Sessions' assistants as evidence that the emails of other similar assistants should have been searched as well. Rejecting that claim, Cooper pointed out that the search of Sessions' two assistants "should not be fashioned into ammunition against the agency that requires it to search the records of still more assistants. The only sure consequence of accepting American Oversight's logic here would be to incentivize agencies to err on the side of under-inclusion in their searches. An agency would know that if it includes any one of a category of custodians, then it risks being forced to search all custodians belonging to the same category, regardless whether the agency believes the others possess responsive records." American Oversight attacked the agency's claim that any communications with Huber had been oral and, Cooper pointed out that "the existence of one written record means that the Court should now disregard entirely representations by officials that most of their communications with Huber regarding his investigative focus would have occurred orally. The Court declines to take that leap." He explained that 'that the agency officials' representations that they spoke with Huber rather than issued written directives to him turned out to be definitively incorrect on one occasion does not mean that those representations were entirely inaccurate." Rejecting American Oversight's claim that the agency had interpreted its request too narrow, Cooper emphasized that "American Oversight is one of the more sophisticated FOIA practitioners in this district, and the comparatively broader language it deployed in its Recusal and Drafting requests â€" using 'reflecting' and 'relating to' respectively â€" suggests it understands how to use different words to capture different categories of records. Although courts are to construe FOIA requests liberally, they must also give effect to an apparently deliberate decision to use different words for different requests." Speaking in defense of the agencies, Cooper noted that "if courts do not hold FOIA requesters to their word â€" especially sophisticated ones who have demonstrated an ability to manipulate language to either narrow or broaden a request â€" agencies will always have to err on the side of the broadest plausible interpretation, forcing them to do more work than even the requesters themselves may have wanted."
Issues: Litigation - Sanctions - Bad faith, Request - Specificity | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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